The thing is, you have to interrogate the Honor books deeper than Hornblower just to actually read them. The aesthetic is Hornblower, but the content is much different. The obvious reason is simply the arc of Honor's and Hornblower's careers. Hornblower's arc starts as a midshipman. He doesn't get a command until three books in. Honor has a ship command in the first book and rapidly progresses to squadron command, which Hornblower wouldn't do until nine books in. Hornblower didn't make admiral until his very last book.
Yeah. This is why I think David Drake's
RCN series does a much better job of capturing "Horatio Hornblower but in space," or perhaps more accurately "Aubrey and Maturin but in space."
There's a lot more focus on Daniel Leary receiving single-ship commands or even working as a subordinate officer, in a setting that
much more closely resembles the politics of Georgian England (with an admixture of late Republican Rome, because Drake liked to write what he knew). Things like the financial constraints of officers on half-pay, the class divisions between the aristocracy, the middle class, and the working-class oiks who crew the ships, and the way dueling culture shapes society, show up much more prominently in Drake's narrative, while they are nonexistent or nearly so in Weber's.
Whereas Harrington and her setting share basically nothing with Hornblower but his initials and the perfunctory
existence of a hereditary aristocracy.
Similarly, Weber does a lot more with things like politics and economics in his books in a way Forester didn't. By making them more prominent he...well, makes them more prominent and invites a deeper analysis of them. Much of the Hornblower books revolve around single-ship actions, or are at least tightly focused on them, whereas more than half of the Weber books are at least squadron-level and there's probably a half-dozen Trafalgar-level beatings handed out. The wider scope demands deeper thought of the reader to visualize and understand. That demand is a double-edged sword.
This is also true.
I mean I don't really disagree that he's not handling the subjects particularly deeply, but he is in fact putting his grubby mitts all over them, and those subjects thus become things to be discussed or considered rather than background noise, as they would have been in a Hornblower (or an RCN) novel.
Put another way, Weber makes you notice, even if you choose to gloss over it.
In Weber's defense, C.S. Forester had the massive advantage of writing in a setting that already existed. He didn't need to extrapolate the politics of Georgian Britain or Napoleonic France, because they were already quite well documented and no more than 120-140 years in the past at the time he started writing.
Weber has to make up his stories from nothing, so he's
forced to integrate his ideas about history, politics, and economics into the story. Which, well, they're not great.
This. I think a lot of sci fi works have the issue of wanting cool toys whose pre-reqs would realistically eliminate scarcity with even the most pathetic of trickle down economy, but still want scarcity to exist to justify conflicts that use the cool toys. The difference is that HH awkwardly puts a spotlight on it. If most people are on the dole, who is churning out dreadnoughts? Why can't that be used to churn out the dole? Why would they waste it on dreadnought production if the pressing demand to satisfy the dole is so important?
Well, Weber's answer, which admittedly only makes real sense if you're a Republican, is:
"Haven
has to keep up a massive military-industrial complex. Because only by conquering places with functional economies to loot can it keep the BLS going for more than a few more years at a time before the economy collapses entirely. So Haven was investing massively in both 'welfare' and war machines, the way I imagine the USSR did because
of course the USSR was a welfare state exactly like the 1990s Democrats surely wanted to create in America, and also because I never really had more than a superficial understanding of the Soviet Union and its history apart from the awareness that they were pointing big scary missiles at me, because the Cuban Missile Crisis happened when I was ten and it justifiably scared the hell out of me. So anyway, Haven's oligarchy devotes a greatly disproportionate share of their subpar GDP to the military, and all the rest to a mad scramble to keep the Dole going."
We can, of course, pick at this all day. As you point out, it invites the question of how Haven maintains dreadnought production
at all.
